Santander adds trio of fintechs to portfolio

Santander Group’s fintech VC fund Santander InnoVentures has added a trio of companies to their portfolio, which now numbers 15.

Santander InnoVentures provided descriptions of the three companies.

UK-based Pixoneye technology offers predictive personalization capabilities that are delivered on device, to capture consumers’ changing needs, offering predictive accuracy that can be integrated with brands’ customer relationship manager systems and recommendation platforms. Pixoneye’s technology leverages photo and video content to provide consumer insights, as well as a recommendation engine that predicts future actions and behavioural patterns without ever seeing or moving the photos from the device itself.

“Pixoneye has seen great commercial momentum in 2017,” founder and CEO Ofri Ben-Porat said. “Institutions such as banks and insurers are putting big focus on investing in predictive, personalization technology aimed at making their apps as smooth and accurate as possible. At a time when fintech is thriving in the UK, we were also looking for a strategic partner with a strong enough digital presence, we found just that.”

Also based in the UK, Curve is the world’s first ‘connected finance’ startup that is currently available to business users. It combines all your cards into one MasterCard® connected to a mobile app, in order to simplify the way you spend, see and save your money. Curve has been used for more than £50 million in payments in more than 100 countries during beta, and will soon fully launch in Europe. The company was recently named one of Europe’s 50 hottest fintech startups and joined Tech City UK’s Upscale 2017, a hand-picked network of the UK’s most promising technology companies.

“Santander’s investment in Curve is exactly the right partnership we believe we need to better serve customers” founder and CEO Shachar Bialick said. “Curve is seeking an unusual position in the emerging marketplace for financial services – to complement, not replace, incumbents and deliver customer value by simplifying mobile access to a growing range of propositions.

“We believe it takes boldness and creativity for an incumbent bank to partner with us as together we invent the future of marketplace banking. Everything about our relationship with Santander tells us we’ve found the right partner to work with, and we’re excited to work closely together to earn our place in the lives of the customers.”

American startup Gridspace owns a platform that can process conversational interactions from disparate sources across the organization without impacting the availability and performance of its communications. Gridspace’s speech processing software combines new techniques in the fields of speech recognition, natural language processing and artificial intelligence to turn conversational interactions into structured business data.

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